Thursday, February 26, 2015

One more thing.

Here's another way I've been spending the dreary cold days.

For the past several years Cheryl and I have been cataloging the insects and spiders of Crowley's Ridge, the anomalous small range of hills which runs by our house in the northeast corner of Arkansas. We have kept photographic records for the Ridge, and of course as we have traveled to other parts of the state we have been taking pictures of everything we saw, since that is our pleasure. But I have been putting specifically the Crowley's Ridge photos on Picasa Web albums (The Butterflies of Crowley's Ridge, the Dragonflies of Crowley's Ridge, etc.) and arranging them as photographic field guides, hoping they might be useful to people learning Arkansas insects.

Well it occurs to me that by now we have taken images of most of the butterflies in the state as a whole. The major ones I am missing are the irruptives that every few years come just across the Texas border into the Lake Millwood area. They are all common Texas species that we know quite well from traveling there, and it didn't seem worth it for us to drive all the way to Lake Millwood just to say we have seen them in Arkansas. We have images of these species that we have taken in Texas, so I decided I could just add them in and make a new set of albums, and call them "Butterflies of Arkansas." We have about 130 species, which is as many species as anyone is likely to see in the state. We are missing nine species that are considered to be regularly occurring, though very rare (we'll make it a goal this summer to look for them, and that will get us out in some parts of the state we are not very familiar with).

So what I am saying is, I have been passing a few days in my study splicing pictures together and creating this new collection of field guides, THE BUTTERFLIES OF ARKANSAS, which I have put on five albums and I am just this moment making them public. Here they are, in case you might be interested.

About Sweating

My wife Cheryl and I have always loved everything to do with nature, but in the last ten or fifteen years we have been especially focused on insects. If the day is sunny, we grab our binoculars, our cameras, and take off for the wilds. Even on a poor day the marvels pile up quickly. A new season is just beginning. In this blog I mean to record the things we discover, the photos we take.